The electronic transmission of documents by way of fax systems continues to be commonplace and, often, an essential component of many business activities. With the emergence of email and mobile computing devices in the business environment, many predicted the demise of fax, however fax continues to thrive and grow as it is the only means of communication to the existing base of fax machines, can print out paper, and offers compliance to many financial and regulatory requirements.
However, there continue to be shortcomings among the fax systems currently in use in the business and consumer markets. With the growth of VoIP (Voice over Internet), fax transmissions designed for the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) have more difficulty completing transmissions and require several retries to complete. Further, as the number of pages increase, the chances of successful transmissions decrease. Also, there is no page counting system in fax, so that a 100 page fax that cannot complete after 90 pages will start anew at page 1 the next attempt. And finally, that 100 page fax may take as long as an hour or more of a phone call to complete the transmission.
Facsimile (“fax” or “faxing”) has been an important part of business communications for over 20 years. It is a secure, and reliable way to send a document from one place to another and provides a confirmation of receipt. There have been few changes to the actual fax transmissions or speed since the early 1990's. With the growth of VoIP and the growth of fax, more problems are introduced to the fax process such as dropped calls, incomplete faxes, and longer documents that can take long periods of time sending.
The present invention overcomes problems in the current fax system and in prior art of fax systems by using the fax transmission as a signal to securely stream the fax image data via the internet and greatly reducing the transmission time.
Non-facsimile-communication-protocol/non-facsimile-image digital data may be reproduced by a non-featured facsimile machine, but the non-facsimile-communication-protocol/non-facsimile-image digital data will be rendered in a manner that does not produce intelligible human-readable information to the recipient.
Non-facsimile-communication-protocol/non-facsimile-image digital data is also multi-bit digital data representing non-facsimile-communication-protocol information wherein facsimile-communication-protocol information is signals or instructions to create/facilitate a communication channel between a transmitting device and a receiving device.
In summary, non-facsimile-communication-protocol/non-facsimile-image digital data is machine readable data that is transmitted in addition to conventional facsimile data wherein if the non-facsimile-communication-protocol/non-facsimile-image digital data is reproduced by the receiving facsimile machine, the non-facsimile-communication-protocol/non-facsimile-image digital data does not produce intelligible human-readable information as the receiving facsimile machine would render the concurrently transmitted conventional facsimile data.